I can’t finish the game on my tablet. Usually I rattle through Patience, but tonight I’m flustered and keep putting the cards in the wrong place.
My mind is at the pier where two fifteen-year-olds scan the stars. ‘Way things are progressing that might be you and me one day up there in a spacecraft, Jade,’ he says. I feel again my shuddering at the thought of darkness, of being eternally lost in the void.
There’s a clicking noise. The monitor’s coming on.
One evening we were strolling hand in hand on the promenade. We were sixth formers, life getting real at last. But Sam’s attention wasn’t on me. He was looking at the street lights, making a chain around the curve of the bay. Their reflection bobbed weirdly in the black sea. ‘Like undiscovered stars,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they something?’
Perhaps then I knew space was his real love. We’ll link arms for a bit longer, I told myself, but eventually his grip will loosen. He has other ambitions.
A picture appears on the monitor: of a blue-brown landscape with ice patches. An icon, Astral Channel: Space-Cam 352, is bottom left of the screen. Five minutes to go. My sense of nervousness grows. What am I afraid of? Disaster? Or its opposite?
At secondary school he liked reading books on Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus. We’d started kissing and I wanted to talk about feelings with him, but emotional landscapes absorbed him less than geological ones.
As our shoes trod softly in the sand some nights, there were times I felt like an alien landed on planet Earth. He searched the heavens for extra-terrestrial activity, oblivious to the non-earthly being at his side.
It’s time. They’ve planned the journey with precision, so that arrival occurs between the dust storms on the blue moon. He’ll join a team down there: small but growing. Few elect to return on the five yearly earth bus. Do they all have priestly instincts, these astronauts? Is he alone in leaving behind one who thinks about him, in being wedded to bleakness?
I see the landing module at last. It trembles above the lunar crust, spindly, a giant metallic spider. It descends vertically, wobbles drunkenly, then is motionless. Safe arrival. I feel relief.
At last, he is where he has always wanted to be. If the moon supports life, will he be the one to find it? The pitted surface, freezing cold, so hostile: how could anything endure there? The picture-shot flickers, the monitor turns off. The live-cam is finished.
I check the cot. Nora is as still as a doll. I get into bed and Frank, like a heavy, cumbersome log, rolls over in his sleep onto me. I hoick myself free, turn away from him. My daughter and my husband: the gravity pulling me, weighing on me. I belong with them. Yet that sense of being non-earthly has returned, squats on my shoulders, a large arachnid, its limbs stopping my mouth and nostrils.
